Maidens' Trip

I have been on the look-out for this book by Emma Smith for a while, even since I learned that it was about the war service of young women on the canals during the Second War War, and had recently been re-issued. It's an intriguing subject. This was her first book, published in 1948, when she was only twenty-five. It was based on her own experiences and she explains in the introduction is part fact, part fiction. She wrote it at breakneck speed in three months and it does show in places. It veers between the first and the third person rather disconcertingly, but no matter. It is full of youthful verve, innocence, joie-de-vivre and, she frankly confesses, egotism. It's the story of three young women - all under twenty - taking a boat full of steel to Birmingham and bringing back a cargo of coal, an arduous and even dangerous journey. I loved it. There's some wonderful writing and some piercing little insights: 'we tried to delay the passing of any portion of our lives, we still imagined that we lost, not gained the minutes.'

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest

In a recent blog, Martin Edwards referred to the rather old-fashioned habit of putting a list of characters at the beginning of crime novels. I could have done with one recently when I read THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNETS' NEST, the last of Stieg Larsson's trilogy. These novels, in particular the last two, are not free-standing and long as they are individually, together they make one enormous story. Some of the characters have rather similar names, too, and I didn't always remember who was who from the second volume. I thoroughly enjoyed it: gripping reading. But what I find hardly credible as a writer is that he wrote the whole lot without looking for a publisher - of course, it wasn't his day job, just something he knocked off in his spare time for fun. And that's even more staggering. Just the thought of it makes me want to lie down with a wet towel round my head.

Snow

After I wrote about SICK HEART RIVER in last week's blog, I got to thinking about other works of fiction that deal with the intense cold, not least because we've had a bit of that ourselves and have been snowed in. I realised that some of the most memorable books I've read have dealt with weather conditions of snow and intense cold.

I first read Apsley Cherry-Gerrard's THE WORST JOURNEY IN THE WORLD (1922) about twenty-five years ago when a friend and I were house-sitting in Sussex. It was written by the youngest member of Scott's disastrous expedition to the South Pole. Cherry-Gerrard was part of the rescue team that found the frozen bodies of Scott and three other men. I recommend this book as a cure for mild depression, because as you read it you begin to feel profoundly grateful that you are not there. At least, you console yourself, you haven't been driven to eating the ponies. So things can't really be that bad.

Solzhenitsyn's A DAY IN THE LIFE OF IVAN DENISOVICH I always associate with the winter I spend as a postgraduate at Keele University. Hardly the gulag, I agree, but it was very, very cold and there was still snow on the ground at Easter. Transport connections were lousy and I had a bad case of cabin fever.

Peter Hoeg's best-seller, MISS SMILLA'S FEELING FOR SNOW, was gripping for about the first two thirds, but the plot became preposterous after that and it is largely the evocation of a wintry Copenhagen that stays in my mind.

Finally, Jack London's short story 'To Build a Fire' (1908). I first read this years and years ago - probably as an undergraduate - and I have just found the full next on the internet. It is about a man travelling in the Yukon whose only hope of survival is to build a fire and it is just as chilling in every sense as I remembered. I don't want to spoil it for you. Go and read it - and shiver.

John Buchan and others

A friend who reads my blog asked me, 'How do you manage to read so much?' I don't read nearly as much as I have done at some periods of my life, but still . . . ten minutes sometimes over an early morning cup of tea, half an hour over lunch, always at bed-time, maybe even for a couple of hours in the evening. It all adds up. I can read pretty fast, but I don't tend to unless the book has lost its grip on me and I just want to get to the end. I prefer to let the writer set the pace and really sink into the novel.I did manage to get through a fair bit of reading over Christmas and the New Year. Here are some that I rate highly.

Stefan Zweig's BURNING SECRET is really a novella, published as a very attractive little book by Pushkin Press. It is set at a turn of the century German watering place. The philandering young Baron is determined to seduce an attractive married woman, almost past her prime, holidaying with her twelve-year old son, who at first provides the Baron with a way into her affections and then is an impediment to the consummation of the affair. Zweig is a wonderful writer with a deep understanding of human nature. I galloped towards the end, heart in mouth, desperate for things to turn out well, and fearing that they wouldn't. I won't say what happens. Do read it.

John Buchan's Edward Leithen stories were recommended by Natasha Cooper at St Hilda's last summer. They are good fun, and the last, SICK HEART RIVER, which takes place in the frozen wastes of Northern Canada, is a lot more than that. It is about coming to terms with mortality and about wresting meaning from life in the face of death. Buchan writes so well. I could almost feel the cold coming off the page and it's touching to reflect that it was written at the end of his own life and published posthumously.

Finally Marilynne Robinson's fine noveL, GILEAD, which I should really have read before HOME - discussed elsewhere on this blog- because it was written earlier and essentially tells part of the same story from a different viewpoint. A full realised world and a tour-de-force of technique and imagination. Brilliant, really.

The Pattern in the Carpet

Margaret Drabble's book is subtitled A PERSONAL HISTORY WITH JIGSAWS. It is partly a history of jigsaws (a little too much of this for me) and partly a memoir, focusing on her Aunt Phyl with whom she shared a love of jigsaws. Aunt Phyl was a key person in Drabble's childhood. Drabble remarks that it was almost impossible to please her mother, but almost impossible not to please Aunt Phyl. A primary school teacher and single, she liked playing with children and was pretty much the perfect aunt. We get sidelight too onto Drabble's parents, her difficult, depressive mother, and gentle Quaker father. At one point she wonders what he would have thought of Hugh Kingsmill’s words about the Kingdom of Heaven which ‘canot be created by charters and constitutions nor established by arms. Those who set out for it alone will reach it together, and those who seek it in company will perish by themselves.’ This fascinating thought makes me what to find out more about Kingsmill, who was the first subject of biographer Michael Holroyd (Drabble's husband).
I ended this book liking Drabble for her modesty and honesty. And wondering if I should take up jigsaws, which she suggests is an excellent pastime for writers. It switches the brain onto the visual track and gives the verbal part a rest. Gazing out of train windows and going to exhibitions also fulfill that function for me.

A Woman at Home II

Going to the post office to buy stamps and post cards to friends abroad, writing cards, writing letters to the people that I write Christmas letters to, cooking meals, going back to the post office to send the one foreign card I forgot, buying Christmas presents, wrapping Christmas presents, doing the washing, going back to the post office with a parcel, preparing a Christmas stocking, making a Christmas cake, planning menus, posting Christmas cards, cooking meals, writing a shopping list, ordering a turkey, collecting a turkey, cooking meals, taking a child to the pantomime, doing the washing, tidying the house, making up beds for guests, preparing and giving a reading at Carols by Candlelight, cooking meals, going to the post office with a final parcel, doing the washing, choosing and wrapping present for child's teacher, stopping car so that child can run back to the house for it on the last day of term, ordering flowers for my mother-in-law's birthday, doing the washing, finding time to celebrating my own birthday a week before Christmas, going food shopping, having a tooth out, cooking meals, doing the washing, doing my accounts, vetting a contract with a publisher, taking old toys to charity shop to make room for new toys, cooking meals, doing the washing, remembering cards and Christmas boxes for the postman, the dustbin man and so on, persuading my reluctant husband to come with me to buy a tree from the local National Trust nursery, consternation when we see the SOLD OUT sign, driving on over the moors in a desperate search, it's starting to snow, and it's getting dark, and the car's making a strange clanking noise . . .

I take back everything I wrote in my last blog.

But when the last Brussels spout peeling has sunk into the compost, the last bit of Christmas wrapping paper has been smoothed out for recycling, and my head is no longer full of lists, I'll be back on my blog writing about books.

Maybe I'll even get round to writing a novel myself.

And yes we did find a tree in the end. We got home safely, too.

A Woman at Home

I am still mulling over the biography of Elizabeth Taylor that I wrote about a few weeks ago. One of Nicola Beauman's arguments is that Taylor might have been an even greater novelist if she hadn't been tied to her sweet-manufacturer husband and the domestic round. I wonder . . . There is virtually always a difficult time in the life of a writer when they are honing their craft, serving their apprenticeship as it were, and earning hardly any money. For many writers this problem never goes away. The general public would be amazed, I think, if they knew how little most writers make. For Taylor this was never a problem. There was plenty of money - enough soon for domestic help and for boarding schools for the children - and she was able to concentrate on producing the best work she could while for years she didn't earn a penny. In his book ON BECOMING A NOVELIST John Gardner states the case baldly, 'The best way a writer can keep himself going is to live off his (or her) spouse.'

Yes, there's another side to this. Cyril Connolly felt that the pram in the hall could be the ruin of a promising writer, and it is true that combining writing with babies and toddlers is difficult, but once the children are at school it becomes a whole lot easier (even without boarding schools). Of course the school day is short, but look at what Trollope managed to do in three hours a day. He thought a writer shouldn't need much more than that, and I tend to agree. It's the other stuff (like writing this blog!) that it's hard to fit in.

On balance, it suits me. And I couldn't put it better than Agatha Christie, who once sly remarked that crime is an excellent occupation for a woman at home.